


We Were Butterflies

by myrtlebroadbelt



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Bilbo Baggins-Centric, Canon Compliant, Depression, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Past Character Death, Post-Battle of Five Armies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-23 07:22:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10714869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrtlebroadbelt/pseuds/myrtlebroadbelt
Summary: One month after returning to Bag End, Bilbo woke to the sight of a butterfly. It was perched on his bedside table, its mottled brown wings opening and closing as often as the covers of the book he had attempted to read the night before.





	We Were Butterflies

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  “I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”  
> \- John Keats to Fanny Brawne, [3 July 1819](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/selected-love-letters-fanny-brawne)

One month after returning to Bag End, Bilbo woke to the sight of a butterfly. It was perched on his bedside table, its mottled brown wings opening and closing as often as the covers of the book he had attempted to read the night before.

Bilbo disregarded it, still in that state between sleeping and waking when everything seems still to be a dream. He blinked once, twice, three times against the sun, bright enough now to rudely hint that he should already be out of bed.

He rolled over, running his palm across the cool expanse of bed sheet until his fingers crooked around the edge of the mattress. He still slept on the same side every day, no different than before. So it would be foolish to think the space beside him looked any emptier than it had before he left. Foolishness, however, had become a far closer friend since then.

Bilbo fell asleep again to birds chirping. Second breakfast, by the sound of it.

He did most of his sleeping during the day, as a restless mind and a too-soft mattress usually kept him stirring into the early hours of the morning. Once he finally toppled over the edge, he was likely to remain in bed until at least elevenses. It was only at night, when his thoughts were the loudest, that sleep became elusive again.

Slow to start and slow to stop, as his father would have said.

Bilbo woke again a few hours later. His mouth tasted like sleep, and he had a dull pain between his eyebrows which he attempted to rub away, to no avail. He stretched his legs under the sheets, toes just barely touching the shallow footboard. A thought struck him suddenly at the feeling of it.

 _He would be too tall_.

No. None of that now. A distraction. That was what he needed. A tight grip on his wrist to tug his hand away from the fire before it could scald him.

A distraction was precisely what he got, in the form of a butterfly, the very same as before, fluttering jauntily across the room to alight on the lower left bedpost. Bilbo, still on his back with the edge of the quilt tucked under his chin, stared down his belly at the creature.

“Where did you come from?” he asked aloud, voice cracking.

The butterfly did not answer.

Bilbo blinked slowly, and it was all he could do not to keep his eyes closed. With a deep breath that ended on a whine, he lifted himself to sit heavily on edge the mattress. It was then he noticed the open window. He didn’t remember opening it, but it lately took him careful consideration to even identify the day of the week.

He rose on wobbly ankles and approached the foot of the bed. Before he could reach it, the butterfly fluttered to the wardrobe, where it sat coyly batting its wings at him.

“It’s rude to enter people’s houses uninvited,” he grumbled.

The butterfly had nothing to say for itself.

Bilbo shook his head and moved away from the bed, but he had hardly taken two steps when a familiar panic set in, and his hands felt desperately at his chest for something that wasn’t there.

For several days after his return, he had slept with his magic ring tucked into the pocket of his nightshirt. Then one morning he had woken to discover it missing, and had made an absolute mess of the room, before at last finding it in a tangle of bed sheets.

The knowledge of his newest hiding place returned to him now, and he hurried to open the drawer of his bedside table. There it sat, waiting patiently to be found beside a row of spare candles. The smooth, familiar metal was a relief between his fingers. When his heart had retreated from the back of his throat, he slipped the ring into his front pocket, where it made itself a comfortable weight.

He bent down to retrieve his trousers from the heap he had left on the carpet the night before, tugged them on over the hem of his nightshirt, and headed for the kitchen, making sure to close the bedroom door behind him — leaving his guest with only one choice for escape.

Bilbo felt a groan in his stomach as he shut the door. He didn’t much miss the meals he slept through, having grown accustomed to more sporadic eating on the road. But when he did take his first bite, late in the morning or early in the afternoon, it seemed only to make him hungrier.

Slow to start and slow to stop.

As he approached the pantry, he decided he felt too hungry to cook — not that there was much there to begin with. Fewer meals meant fewer trips to market, which meant scant shelves and dwindling barrels. He had learned to go on busier days, if he went at all. It was easier to get lost in a crowd then, and people were less likely to approach him, and not for long if they did — distracted and swept away as they were by the bustling queues and last loaves of bread.

Bilbo took a half-eaten plate of cold chicken from the shelf and sat at the kitchen table pulling pieces apart with his fingers while the kettle hung on the hearth. It wasn’t safe, this kettle time, as his thoughts risked boiling over with the water. It was too easy to feel the distance between here and everywhere else, between now and then.

Too easy to slip into the past.

It didn’t take long for the chicken to find itself neglected in front of him as his eyes settled on the herbs that hung near the shelf in the corner. Dangling there like fresh washing on a clothes line, like beehives from a tree branch, like dwarves in a spider’s nest. His gaze softened, and all at once, he could feel the splintering wood beneath his feet, hear the silvery twang of Sting cutting through web. The air was heady, and his heart pounded through every inch of him.

They were so close now, so close to the mountain. He had only to reach out and he could touch it, prick his finger on its peak. But there were spiders, so many spiders, and he was falling, and his ring was falling, and he couldn’t catch it, and there was a branch in his back, and he was falling again ...

A trio of raps on the window tore him away before he could land on the leafy forest floor. Coming back was like breaking the surface after nearly drowning, and he gasped to match the feeling. Looking over, he saw a face through the glass — Holman, tending to the garden. But not tending to it now. Looking very concerned instead.

Another sound reached his ears then, and he rushed to the hearth to remove the screaming kettle.

Bilbo turned back to the window and unlatched it. “Hello, Holman,” he said. He hesitated to say “good morning” or “good afternoon,” for he knew not which it was, and, either way, he had yet to decide if it was good or not, though he suspected it wasn’t.

“Sorry to give you a fright, Mr. Bilbo,” the gardener said with a tip of his cloth hat, revealing a head of sweat-dampened curls. “I just couldn’t help but hear that kettle whistling something ferocious, and it went on for a mighty long time. I thought something might be wrong.”

“I understand, Holman,” Bilbo said, and forced a flicker of a smile. “Thank you very much.”

“Is your hearing all right, Mr. Bilbo? If you don’t mind my asking, of course. It’s just that my cousin … well, his started to go when he was not much older than you, and given that you went away to … well, to I don’t know where … I only wondered …”

“I hear quite well, Holman, thank you for your concern,” Bilbo said, and then, before the old man could question him further: “Would you like some tea?”

“Oh,” Holman replied, and the look on his face suggested that, whatever time it was, it wasn’t tea time. “Yes, that would be very fine, Mr. Bilbo. Thank you.”

He moved away from the window slightly, no doubt in anticipation of being invited into the house. But Bilbo merely stepped back into the dim depths of the kitchen to prepare his cup. He winced, wondering what his father — indeed, even his mother — would think of him. The bare minimum, humming along to Holman’s small talk as he tilted the pot and spooned the sugar, was all that he could muster the energy for.

Bilbo handed Holman his tea through the window. The old gardener thanked him ten times over, but Bilbo saw the way he glanced out of the corner of his eye as he took his first sip. Wondering what other strange conditions he had caught from his adventure other than deafness, no doubt.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Bilbo said, and turned toward the parlor.

The table by the parlor window was covered in papers — mostly legal gibberish to reclaim his belongings. It was a slow and complicated process, but necessary if he didn’t want to buy things back himself.

“Why should I buy back that which is rightfully mine?” Bilbo had demanded of the lawyers. The words had left a bitter taste in his mouth when he realized from whom he had borrowed them.

Bilbo didn’t bother clearing space now. He placed his cup over a wordy clause, and his plate over a column of signatures. There he sat, watching the milk swirl through his tea like a storm cloud where he had forgotten to stir it.

Afraid of his mind wandering again to places he was not yet ready to visit, he picked up the nearest book and opened it to the very middle, where the stitches showed along the spine. For all he absorbed, he may as well have been holding it upside down. After a page and a half, he tossed it aside with the rest of the mess and took a sip of tea, wondering what on earth he did with himself before.

He glanced at the mantelpiece, and his parents glanced back. “Hello,” he said to them in his head, “I miss you,” and he could almost hear their voices speaking back to him, though he could not tell what they said. Just the sound of them, like a song without words.

Bilbo’s eyes narrowed. Something was meant to be there that wasn’t. Something to fill the space between the bud vase and the tobacco jar. Grumbling under his breath, he sat up and sifted through the papers, searching for his list. He very nearly gave up before he remembered it was folded in his trouser pocket.

The lawyers had told him to keep a record. He added items to it as he remembered them, the artifacts of a previous life. It was strange, how little one thought of what one had until it was lost, how empty a house could feel when its corners were incomplete.

Bilbo plucked pen and ink from the windowsill and scribbled _biscuit jar_ in the first blank space. Then, just under it, _biscuits_. He let out a breath that was close to a laugh as he thought of the balding hulk of a dwarf who had stood just over there, stretching his tattooed fingers for a treat. Then, suddenly, he didn’t much feel like laughing anymore.

When he had finished his plate, he sat back in his chair and swallowed another gulp of tea, closing his eyes and focusing on the heat that seeped down to his belly. The sun was bright through the window, and warm, and it made him feel heavy. He barely noticed himself slide out of his chair and onto the carpet, where he curled like a housecat in the warmest square of sun.

He lay on the floor often as a child, to play with his toys or hear his mother’s stories or, indeed, to nap away the afternoon. His father did not understand it, and he had not understood it himself, when he had come of age. _Perfectly good_. Those were the words his father had used, about the chairs and beds and benches he had left abandoned. Perfectly good. It was a peculiar phrase, and yet he could think of none better to describe his life before. _A perfectly good phrase_ , he thought as he fell asleep, but he was no longer quite so fond of it.

That night, when he returned to his room, he shone a candle across every surface and into every crevice he could reach. Satisfied that the butterfly had shown itself out, he closed the window and drew the curtains before crawling back into an already unmade bed and preparing for his nightly toss and turn.

He found Holman’s teacup sitting on the ledge outside the kitchen window two days later, filled to the brim with rainwater from the morning’s shower.

 

 

The next time Bilbo saw a butterfly, he was in the bath. He could not remember how long it had been since he last took one, so he thought it best to start the clock over again.

It had taken him weeks to scrub the adventure off himself when he came back, and to this day he still discovered dirt lingering like mineral veins in the cracks of his feet. He wondered where it had come from, which corner of the earth had decided to make itself a part of him. Eventually, he began to worry that his next bath would be the one to wash him entirely anew, that you could look at the soles of his feet and never know the miles they had traveled.

In any case, he found filling the tub a chore, as he found many mundane tasks he had completed before without a second thought. Yet once he dipped his first toe in, it was as if the water became quicksand, and it was near impossible to convince himself to get out again.

Slow to start and slow to stop.

He was lying back against the curve of the tub now, examining his wrinkled fingertips and not much wanting to move, when he noticed his visitor. It rested close to the copper faucet, with wings that curled into flicks at all four corners, in a bright red that stood out like a splash of blood against the white porcelain.

Bilbo sat up at the discovery, and immediately felt very exposed. He pulled his knees to his chest, eyeing the butterfly cautiously. It was absolutely absurd, and he knew it, but it was one thing the journey had not changed in him.

While the others tossed off their heavy layers, along with their shame, and leapt into the fountain at Rivendell, he had politely asked where he could find a basin to himself. The only available room was open to the elements, as most were, but an elf had very kindly hung a swath of fabric for privacy. When Bilbo left the room later, he found himself face to face with the leader of the company, who was apparently waiting his turn. The dwarf had offered a brief nod and an unreadable expression, and though they were both fully clothed, it had taken Bilbo close to an hour to will the flush from his face.

He and the butterfly stared each other down for a few moments now, neither of them moving, until Bilbo realized there was no way to coax the creature out of the bathroom from where he sat, having closed the door when he entered. From this he also concluded that the butterfly had been in the room when he stepped into the tub, and had therefore already seen whatever it had seen.

“Oh, for goodness … This is ridiculous,” Bilbo said finally, and hoisted himself up with a hand on either side of the tub. The butterfly skittered away from the sloshing water and landed on a nearby stool. “Don’t go gossiping to your friends about this,” he warned as he stepped carefully onto the tile and pulled a towel from the rack.

When he left the bathroom, the butterfly followed. He lost track of it somewhere along the way to the bedroom, where he pulled a fresh set of clothes from the wardrobe and moved to untie his dressing gown. He paused, hands at his waist, when he caught sight of his reflection in the looking glass.

He knew he was changed — leaner, tanner, with a scar lurking at his hairline. But more than anything at the moment, he thought he could do with a haircut. He had noticed it as he scrubbed a cloud of shampoo through the strands, and he saw now how the ends soaked the fabric around his shoulders, the heavy curls flattened across his forehead. He had trimmed it more than once on the road, having no shortage of sharp objects at any given time. The dwarves had suggested to no end that he let it grow, to be long enough to braid, to make up for his apparently tragic lack of beard. But Bilbo disliked the way it tangled at the nape of his neck and hung in his eyes. It didn’t feel like _him_ , he had said, whoever that was. He still wasn’t entirely sure.

Not long ago, he would have gone to market, where the barber would have snipped it into just the style he wanted. But he wouldn’t do that now. Not a chance. If he flinched to discuss the weather with the fishmonger, the thought of spending half an hour held hostage in the haircutter’s chair was worse than dragons.

So he tied his dressing gown tighter and made his way to the study seeking a pair of scissors. When he found one, its dull brass handles peeking out amidst a jar of quill feathers, he gathered a piece of hair from his fringe, and he trimmed. He did it without a mirror, not caring much what he looked like, just wanting to feel the air again.

As he cut, he recalled a story, told in hushed explanation by a campfire, of a dwarven custom — cutting beards to mark a loss, to mourn the dead. Bilbo did not have a beard, nor did he attach much value to the length on his head. He would have cut it anyway, but nevertheless, as he watched the damp curls drop to the carpet, he allowed himself to think of it as a symbol. Indeed, it was hard for anything not to be, these days.

It was fitting, then, that as he laid the scissors down on his writing desk, he saw it there, its many clauses laid open as if asking to be read: the contract. He stored it here in the study, where he rarely ventured, to keep it safe from spilt tea and rising clutter. He’d feared it lost in the chaos of the auction, or perhaps pocketed by the auctioneer, to be slapped down on a table at the Green Dragon and scoffed at over a round of pints. Instead, it had found its way under a shrub, a fact discovered by Holman, who had arrived as Bilbo was standing helpless in the garden and volunteered his help.

Bilbo ran his fingers lightly over the signatures, across names he could barely hear inside his own head without renewed heartache. He was reminded, as he traced the second signature, of a knowing smile engulfed by a beard as white as snowcaps. He had understood, the old dwarf, likely in ways even Bilbo himself hadn’t. Ways he still didn’t. Ways he almost didn’t want to.

He traced the signature above it, and his hand was shaking, and his mind was wandering again, and this time he let it. It carried him back, back to the sight of eagles silhouetted against a cold sky, and the feeling of warm blood beneath his palms. There was a storm churning in his stomach, and a hundred breaths he couldn’t catch.

The words came back to him now, like an echo that had bounced off stone and traveled the length of the world to reach him.

 _Go back to your books_ , _and your armchair_.

And so he had, though the books’ corners now dug into his skin, and the armchair made him go numb in very uncomfortable places. And it felt like a broken promise.

 _Plant your trees_.

And Bilbo had neither the heart nor the time to tell him he had already planted one within the sight of the mountain, that he would have planted himself as well, would have broken his roots through the icy cliffside if it meant staying beside him.

_Watch them grow._

If it had been Bilbo’s choice, they would have watched them together.

 _The world is not in your books and maps_ , the wizard had told him. And perhaps, he thought now, neither was home. Home was in the hand he was holding. Home was in a pair of eyes that looked into his own, until they didn’t. Home was … well, perhaps he didn’t have one anymore.

Bilbo saw a spot of red then, but not in his memory. It was the butterfly again, brushing against the window. He closed his eyes and exhaled, and when he felt he could move again, he stretched his arms over the top of the writing desk to open the window. The butterfly disappeared into the garden, but a breeze quickly took its place, entering the room without invitation and sending papers flying every which way. They covered the contract, and mixed with the hair clippings, and flapped noisily against Bilbo’s leg like an incessant lapdog.

It was all a bit too much for him, all at once, and he shut the window with a thud before collapsing into the stiff chair behind him. He sat there, gripping the edge of the desk with both hands, and sobbed in a way he hadn’t before or since that day.

His hair had dried, on his head and on the carpet, by the time he stopped.

 

 

The next time Bilbo saw a butterfly, he saw two.

He was in the kitchen, slicing into a nearly stale loaf of bread, when the first of the pair landed on his knuckle where he gripped the knife. It made him jump, and the butterfly flitted to the edge of the table in a flash of greyish purple wings. Its friend, a golden yellow, landed beside it. They danced around each other for a moment, playful, until they found their way to the pot of honey at Bilbo’s elbow.

“No, no,” he scolded, shooing them away. “That’s not for you.”

The butterflies remained close by with shifty black eyes, and Bilbo suspected they would make another try for it as soon he turned away. He shook his head, hardly believing himself as he pulled the lid off the pot and lifted the dipper. He twirled it by the handle, watching the honey wrap itself around the grooved head. Then, with a silent apology to his father, he held it over the table and let the honey ooze into a sticky puddle on the wood.

The butterflies crowded around it like fauntlings when the sweets are served, their long mouths stretching forward to suck up as much as they could. Bilbo couldn’t help but laugh as he spread more honey across a slice of bread and sat to join them. An unexpected party, indeed.

The butterflies stayed with him until the early evening, darting from room to room in bursts of color. Bilbo watched them, from his armchair at first, then getting up to follow them when they strayed out of sight. He sat at the parlor table sketching the shape of their wings in the margins of his legal papers, and cut a slice of strawberry for them while he had his tea.

Midway through the afternoon, he found them hovering in an empty nook in the hallway, where his mother’s glory box had been. He had written it on the list, and traced it until the pen had stabbed straight through the paper, along with everything he remembered it containing — from feathers the length of his forearm to letters that his father would redden to know his son had seen. He wished he could recall who it was who had carried the box away, that day when he returned to find his history laid out in the garden for the vultures to pick over.

He had thought of his mother often, while he was away — of the stories she told and the secrets she kept. She would have liked the dwarves, right from the start, would have helped them empty the pantry and sat smoking with them after dinner, and listened to tales of the dragon without falling to the rug. He’d wanted to be like her when he was young. To travel the world and return to the comfort of a crackling fire. To be changed, yes, but only for the better.  

That’s where they were different.

Belladonna Took came back, and there was someone there waiting for her. Bilbo Baggins came back, and he had left someone behind.

If he looked closely at the place where the box once sat, he could almost make out the image of a dwarf with half his hair clipped back, wiping his boots on the edge of it. And it made Bilbo ache, less for the past than for a future that would never be. It seemed these days that every corner he rounded, every room he entered and door he opened, he discovered only loss.

When the butterflies eventually found their way into the garden through the kitchen window, he wished he had thought to close it, to keep them there just a bit longer. He stood there for a moment after they disappeared, unsure of what to do with himself. He felt much the same as he had last year, when he woke at the edge of his bed to the thought of a half-remembered dream.

He had traversed an empty house then, somehow emptier than yesterday morning for having not been empty last night. He had stood at a window, as he did now, and he had imagined a chance. It had sung to him in a voice as deep as a mountain chamber, and then it had slipped quietly away. He had seen it in the distance, moving farther and farther east until it could never again be reached or replicated.

He felt like this now, in some way he could not explain, and so it only made sense for him to do what he had done then, even in its smallest form.

The walking stick felt strange in his hand when he pulled it from the rack. It was not the one which had long ago abandoned him among the bridges and ropeways of the goblin tunnels. This one had been his second favorite. He had very nearly gone out the door without one now, but it had caught his eye, and he thought falling back into an old habit might put him to rights.

The sun was still high and the air humid when Bilbo passed to the other side of the gate, and he undid the top two buttons of his shirt to let the breeze touch his collarbone. It caught the scandalized attention of an old hobbit woman who was washing clothes at the foot of the hill, and he made sure to give her a wink and a nod as he passed, smirking at the gasp it earned from her.

There was something on the wind, and it smelled of adventure.

He followed the path past curious eyes and curiouser whispers, through the market and beyond Bywater Pool. His calves ached with every step, having known nothing but rest and the gentlest of exercise in the weeks since his return, but he kept going until he reached the very top of an empty green hill somewhere over the border into Eastfarthing.

Slow to start and slow to stop.

He hadn’t known this was his destination, but now that he was there, in quiet seclusion looking out over the inns and orchards below, with night just beginning to fall, he could think of nowhere better … or at least, nowhere that could be reached by the will of a walking stick.

He dropped to his knees in the tall grass and caught his breath, wetting his dry throat. The sun was setting behind him, to the west toward Bag End, but he chose instead to face the east, where he felt his heart tugging him, perhaps where it still remained. If he squinted, he was sure he could see it, in the shape of a single, solitary peak against a watercolor sky.

It reminded him of the Carrock, of strong arms around him and a fur collar tickling his chin. The sun had been rising then, away towards the mountain. The beginning of something. He squeezed his eyes shut now and felt a tear splash against the back of his hand where it sat in his lap. He was crying, but it was not out of sadness. At least, not the same sadness that had kept him awake at night and asleep in the morning. Not the same sadness that had racked him in his study.

No, this was something else entirely, some new emotion he could not yet find a name for. He could call it by lots of words he already knew, but none of them would be the right ones, in the same way _friend_ hadn’t been, when he’d said it on the threshold that day.

If he ever thought of a name, he decided as the last light of day disappeared around him, he would keep it as secret as the dwarves kept theirs.

 

 

The next time Bilbo saw a butterfly, there were more than he could count.

He hadn’t much wondered about the ones that had come before. He had seen so much by now, in wilder places than this, that a few butterflies seemed insignificant by comparison. It was summer, after all, and the windows were open, and he’d swatted three midges from his leg just this morning.

But this … this was significant.

The butterflies filled the hall where Bilbo stepped out of the bedroom, resting flat against the wood-paneled walls and changing the air ever so slightly where they fluttered around his head. He followed them into the parlor, into the kitchen, into the dining room. He’d seen quite a few things this past year, big and small, good and bad, beautiful and hideous, but he hadn’t seen this.

He’d seen butterflies, of course — blue ones as big as his palm, as he stood at the top of an enchanted forest halfway across the world. But these were more than just blue. They were as orange as dragon’s fire, as green as the rolling hills outside his window, as brown as the dirt where he had buried an acorn with frozen fingers. Their wings were like flower petals, like the smallest paintings.

The first thing Bilbo did, when he saw them, was close every window in the house. Then he searched every book on his shelves until he found the one with the butterfly embossed in gold on the spine. He carried the book into the parlor, sat cross-legged on the carpet, and flipped the yellowing pages to identify each butterfly as he spotted it.

He spent the day at this, taking breaks to pick at the pantry for sweet things to share. The butterflies landed in his hair and tickled his neck, crawled across the pages he was reading. Monarch, ringlet, buckeye, tortoiseshell, speckled wood, painted lady, black swallowtail. Still others he couldn’t find names for, so he named them himself — dragon’s scale, winesap, skin-changer, belladonna.

When night fell, he carried a candle down the hall to his study, where he sat at his desk with a butterfly flexing its wings at the corner of the page, scribbling down images as they came into his head, making sure to use words with dull edges. Words he could imagine as someone else’s, if he needed to.

_Roads go ever ever on,_

_Over rock and under tree,_

_By caves where never sun has shone,_

_By streams that never find the sea;_

_Over snow by winter sown,_

_And through the merry flowers of June,_

_Over grass and over stone,_

_And under mountains of the moon._

And though the windows were closed, and his shirt was sticky against his skin, it felt like breathing fresh air again, like climbing a hillside at sunset, like balancing a butterfly on your finger.

When he went to bed that night, well past midnight, with ink stains on his hands and a knot in his back, leaving the door open so his guests could come and go, he fell asleep faster than he had since he returned.

He woke in time for breakfast, and the butterflies were waiting for him.

It was the wizard, he thought as he spooned sugar into his porridge, purposely spilling some over the edge of the bowl for the others. It must have been. He was always whispering to things with wings, telling them what to do. He sent them, probably to herald his imminent arrival on Bilbo’s doorstep. Any day now, there would be a knock on the door.

A knock. Since his return, the sound of one sped up his heart to mimic it. He’d told them not to bother, when he left, but that didn’t stop him sucking in his breath each time he opened the door.

It wasn’t a knock he heard, at noon on the second day, but rather a jingling bell. Bilbo was on his back on the parlor carpet, one friend on the back of his hand and another on his big toe, where ankle rested on bent knee.

“Is it him, do you think?” he asked the one on his hand. It responded by raising its wings, and it almost looked like a shrug. “Let’s go see, shall we?”

The butterflies scattered to let him through as he padded into the entrance hall. His hand paused on the handle for a moment, wondering if he was ready. Most likely it was just Holman, there to tell him this or that about the rose bushes or the tomato plants, but if it wasn’t ... He wasn’t quite sure how it was supposed to happen, what he was supposed to say, where he was supposed to turn his eyes when he heard the names and remembered the places and felt what he felt when he did.

He shook his head. It was Holman. And if it wasn’t, well, he would save his worry for after he opened the door.

“Hullo, Mr. Bilbo,” said the hobbit woman who stood on the front porch, a young girl beside her. “It’s Prisca Rumble, from down the way? I’m very sorry to bother you, but I —”

She was distracted by the sudden presence of a butterfly, which had made its merry way past Bilbo’s ear and out the door.

“Oh, please, do come in quickly,” Bilbo urged his visitors, stepping aside and motioning his welcome, “before they all get out.”

Mrs. Rumble and her daughter scurried into the house, and Bilbo shut the door as urgently as if a bear had been chasing them.

“Good heavens!” Mrs. Rumble said when she beheld the butterflies, most of which had congregated in the parlor. She shooed one away where it had landed on her bodice. “Oh Hilda, what have you done?”

“You kept them!” the girl cried, jumping and clapping her hands.

“Pardon?” Bilbo asked, stepping away from the door. “I’m afraid I’ve missed something.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Bilbo,” Mrs. Rumble sighed. “You see, it would appear my Hilda and her friends have been playing a little prank on you. Or at least I _thought_ it was little. Honestly, Hilda, how did you even have the time to ...”

“It wasn’t a prank, Mama!”

Bilbo looked down at the girl, uncombed and missing a front tooth, standing with her hands behind her back and rocking to and fro on her toes. And he began to understand. “So the butterflies … they’re from you?”

Hilda’s response, spoken without breath, made him dizzy. “We didn’t want to bother you, promise, Mr. Bilbo, but we saw you in the market, and you looked so sad, and Porty said it was because you were dead, but then Ferdy said that was just a miss … a misumber … a misumberstandling, and we only wanted to cheer you up, that’s all, promise!”

“That’s quite enough, Hilda,” her mother scolded as soon as she was done, leaving Bilbo little time to become familiar with whatever was currently bursting in his chest. “Now apologize to Mr. Bilbo.”

Hilda looked down at her feet. “Sorry.”

“I came right over as soon as I found out,” Mrs. Rumble told him. “We can help you get rid of them if you’d —”

“No!” Bilbo cried, and then changed his tone when he saw her expression. “No, that won’t be necessary.”

“I have another butterfly for you, Mr. Bilbo!” Hilda declared then, defiantly, and revealed from behind her back a small glass jar, with a scrap of muslin draped over the top and secured with twine — and inside, a single fat-bodied creature with fuzzy grey wings and antennae like two feathers.

“Hilda, where did you get that?” her mother gasped. “You take that outside this instant.”

“No, no, it’s quite all right, I assure you,” Bilbo said, and knelt down to meet the girl eye to eye. “Thank you very much for thinking of me. And I’m glad to accept this little friend” — here he tapped on the glass — “although it is, in fact, a moth.”

“A moth?” Hilda marveled.

“Indeed,” Bilbo confirmed. “I’ll wager you caught this one at night, hm?” The girl nodded, eyes wide. “Around the flame of a lantern?” She looked at him as if he must be a wizard, and he laughed.

“Well, that’s the last time I let you play outside after dark, I can promise you that,” Mrs. Rumble said.

Bilbo stared at the moth, clinging still as stone to the side of the jar. A memory came to him then, but he did not let it steal him away. “You know,” he said, “I have quite the story about moths, if you’ve the time to hear it. Would you like some tea?”

Mrs. Rumble dodged a butterfly that flew a bit too close to her nose. “Tea?”

“There’s plenty of it.”

“Well, I … suppose that would be fine.” Bilbo could hear the civility in her voice.

“I’ll get it ready. Please, make yourselves comfortable.” As he moved into the kitchen, he glanced at Hilda and nodded to his armchair. “You can sit there, if you’d like.”

He didn’t think it possible, but the girl’s eyes became even wider. She climbed into the chair and sat upon it like a queen upon her throne, jar in her lap. Her mother, meanwhile, waved a butterfly off the creaky wooden chair across from it, and sat rigidly on the edge.

These weren’t the visitors he’d been expecting, Bilbo thought as he prepared three cups. But then again, neither were the butterflies. Neither were others.

“It’s quite stuffy in here, don’t you think?” Mrs. Rumble remarked as Bilbo entered with the tray. She pulled at her collar for effect. “Shall I open a window?”

“They like the heat,” Bilbo explained. “And I don’t want them to get out.”

“Ah. Of course.” She accepted her tea with a _thank you_ , but Bilbo caught her glancing suspiciously into the cup, as if she expected him to hold her captive as well.

For Hilda, Bilbo had prepared warm milk with honey and dash of cinnamon. “My mum used to call that fairy nectar,” he told her, and she stuck her nose in the mug to breathe in the steam. “I always had it at story time. Even left a dish of it out in the garden once, thinking I could catch fairies with it.” He sat down at the table and ran a gentle finger over the wing of a butterfly that had landed on one of his documents. “It took a few dozen years, but it seems to have worked.”

His guests laughed — Hilda loudly, Mrs. Rumble politely.

“Now,” he said, and took a sip of tea, “where to begin?”

In the trees. Pine trees, to be more specific. He told them about climbing the branches like a ladder, about the wargs below and the cliff behind. About the flaming pine cones and a moth coaxed onto a wizard’s staff and sent on a murmured errand. About trees toppling into each other like dominoes, and dwarves dangling over the edge.

He left parts out. There were no orcs in this version, pale or otherwise. No hero’s moment for the narrator with sword in hand. The eagles plucked them out of the trees, or caught them when they slipped. They were whole and healthy when they reached the Carrock and looked out onto their future. No words, nor embraces, were exchanged.

It was easier somehow, to relive it this way — his own version for a captive audience, who couldn’t tell the difference. The truth, just not all of it.

Bilbo, who had not been a teller of tales since childhood, drew from memories of his mother, her face lit up by the hearth, making up voices and pausing dramatically where the story required it. He wasn’t half as good as she was, but he didn’t expect anyone ever had been or could be.

That didn’t bother his listeners, who gasped and jumped and nearly spilled their drinks at all the right moments. Yes, even Mrs. Rumble, although she appeared terribly embarrassed by her outbursts, and hid her blush in her teacup.

When it was over, and Hilda had finished applauding, she held her jar up to the light and examined the moth inside. “Can we send for the eagles?” she asked.

“Well, we can certainly try,” Bilbo told her, and urged her over to the window. He took the jar from her and turned secretively away, whispering nonsense to the glass. When he was finished, he handed it back to her and unlatched the window. “Go on,” he said. “Let it go.”

Hilda leaned forward, halfway out the window, and slipped the muslin from the top of the jar. The moth floated its escape, hurrying over the flowers and out of sight, off to find the eagles.

Very soon after, one of the butterflies followed.

“Oh no, they’re leaving!” Hilda cried. She reached to close the window, but Bilbo stopped her.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I think I’ve had them quite long enough. And anyway, no one should stay cooped up in one place for too long, don’t you think?”

Hilda nodded her reluctant agreement as she watched yet another butterfly go.

“Well, I believe it’s about time for us to take our leave as well,” Mrs. Rumble said, standing. “Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Bilbo. And for your story. I don’t know how you think of such things.”

Bilbo didn’t correct her. He led them both to the door, and when Hilda waved to him from the front gate, he waved back. And when he entered Bag End again, although the butterflies were leaving, it didn’t feel quite so empty anymore.

 

 

The knock came a few days later, when Bilbo was still asleep. He very nearly rolled over and ignored it, had his imagination not suggested a dozen visitors he would very much hate to snub.

The knocking continued as he tied his dressing gown and made his way down the hall. “Yes, yes, I’m coming!” he shouted, and there was a reason he didn’t tell his companions tea was at seven in the morning.

The callers he found on the front porch, however, were not there for tea, although they may have accepted fairy nectar. It was Hilda, her toothless smile wider than ever. She was flanked by two boys — Ferdy and Porty, if Bilbo remembered correctly. The three of them were armed with jars and nets.

“Good morning, Mr. Bilbo, we’re here to invite you to catch butterflies with us!” Hilda declared, breathless as usual.

Bilbo rubbed his eyes, out of exasperation as much as exhaustion. “It’s very early.”

“Oh,” Hilda said, sounding disappointed. Then her voice rose as she thought of a solution. “We can come back later!”

“No … don’t do that,” Bilbo discouraged, squinting at them out of one eye. It made them laugh, though he didn’t mean it to. “Just … give me a moment.”

Bilbo closed the door on them and rested his forehead against the wood. He couldn’t say if it was the hour or the intrusion or some other balance of indistinct circumstances as delicate as the flap of a butterfly’s wings, but he could already feel that today was not a good day.

This road he traveled was not a level one, nor was it a continuous rise to a determinate peak, nor a steady downward slope. It was winding, and there were inclines and obstacles, and rough terrain that wore on his feet. Sometimes he thought he was almost there, only to decide one day later that he would never make it.

But what would children know of that? What would anyone? It was his road and his alone.

Bilbo sighed through his nose and pushed away from the door with the flats of his palms. Maybe it wasn’t a good day, but locking himself away wouldn’t make it one.

The children were pushing through front gate when he opened the door, his dressing gown replaced by a sunny yellow waistcoat.

“Wait!” he called, and the three of them spun around in unison.

They pulled him down the path, and he didn’t bother asking if their parents knew where they were, as he already knew the answer. The least he could do was make sure they didn’t get into trouble, although he and Mrs. Rumble likely had different definitions of the word.

They took him to a meadow, not far from Bag End, but which he hadn’t visited since his youth — bright days spent atop a picnic blanket in the shadow cast by his mother’s hat. They told him this was where they caught the butterflies, and he could see why. There were even more colors here than he had seen in Bag End, more colors than he even knew existed. They floated above the green in clouds so thick he thought he would inhale them. They had looked beautiful on the leaves of his books — the aesthetic of the out-of-place. But it was on _these_ leaves, the ones framing flowers and clothing shrubs, that they looked loveliest.

They handed him a net, and it felt as strange to him as his walking stick had. Truthfully, it had never been butterflies that captured his curiosity as a child, but fireflies, twinkling like starlight in an inky garden. Perhaps now he could do with a bit more sunshine.

They spent the morning coaxing the creatures into jars, and cried out in protest at Bilbo’s instruction to set them free. “This is where they belong,” he told them. What a blessing it must be, he thought, to have found it.

His one consolation was to let them capture a single caterpillar. They kept it in a jar on the garden bench outside Bag End, where they gasped, not a week later, to discover a chrysalis dangling like a rich lady’s jade earring from the branch they had placed inside. Bilbo would smile into his pillow nearly every morning to hear chatter outside, as the children — sometimes just the three, sometimes more — cooed over its progress. He would describe the stages to them, showing the illustrations in his book.

One day Bilbo found Ferdy seated on the bench tapping despondently on the glass. When he asked what was wrong, the boy told him the caterpillar, which had by now become a butterfly, had poked a hole in its chrysalis but was struggling to get out.

“I want to help it, Mr. Bilbo,” Ferdy said, before getting an idea: “Can we cut it out?”

“Oh, no, we shouldn’t do that,” Bilbo said, recalling a fable told to him by his father, who was a sufficient storyteller himself as long as there was a lesson at the end of it. “You see, there was once a boy who did just what you’ve suggested. He thought he was being kind, but when the butterfly was released, its body was weak and its wings were crumpled. It couldn’t fly.”

“Why?” Ferdy asked.

“Because the boy had rushed it. It wasn’t ready yet. It needed that struggle to make it stronger.”

Ferdy pouted. “I wish it didn’t take so long.”

“Slow to start and slow to stop,” Bilbo said without thinking.

The butterfly emerged a few days later, wine-red and restless. After admiring it for several moments — and one more, and one more, and oh please, Mr. Bilbo, just one more — they set it free, watching it bob above the shrubs and vegetables before disappearing to discover the world.

Their interests strayed from butterflies after that, as is common with children. Instead, they became more and more curious about Bilbo himself, and rather than dragging him out his door, they pushed their way through it, asking for fairy nectar and stories. They brought their friends with them, half a dozen at a time.

Sometimes, on good days, Bilbo indulged them. On bad days, it was all he could do not to shout at them to be gone. And still on other bad days, he indulged them anyway, remembering the butterfly’s struggle, and learned that very often, by the end of it, it wasn’t so bad after all.

He told them stories the way he’d found most comfortable, without embellishment, yet at the same time without detail. He told them of trolls that turned to stone and bears that turned to men, of elves and dragons and mountain giants. When they asked him questions, he answered them, or changed the subject.

He told them nothing of what came after the dragon. Nothing of a large white jewel. Nothing of the battle. Nothing of snow or blood or a cavern of candlelight. He wasn’t sure his mouth could even form the words.

His listeners sat up in the garden like freshly sprouted daisies, laughing and clapping, and when he went to market, their parents approached him not with fingers wagging but with handshakes extended. _Thank you_ , they said, _for keeping them entertained, for looking after them, for taking them off our hands_. They didn’t repeat everything he had heard them say before, in hushed tones between trays of cake and barrels of cider.

You were allowed to be odd, it seemed, as long as you were useful.

As summer ended and the weather grew colder, they came to visit him less and less. But the good days remained — at least in greater measure than before — and the stories he didn’t tell them he wrote down, still leaving bits out, still choosing words that left the shallowest of imprints.

He took to walking more, even in the cold, even in the snow, his walking stick turning his tracks into those of some three-legged creature of legend, haunting Hobbiton — the most fearsome beast any had seen since the Fell Winter. Or maybe just the maddest.

When spring came, the children trickled back, calling for stories, and it all began again.

And so Bilbo slept, and ate, and bathed, and removed the kettle from the hearth, although he didn’t always remember the teacups, and his bed was not always made. He read books from start to finish, sometimes more than once, and he crossed belongings off his list — his mother’s glory box, and his biscuit jar, although not the biscuits. He put everything back in its original place, pieces of a puzzle that formed the image of his old life, though some pieces were still missing, and still others he could find no proper place for — they were the wrong colors, the wrong shapes, and they seemed to belong to another puzzle entirely.

He wondered, as the months wore on and the seasons changed, what such a puzzle would look like, even as he knew, in his heart as much as his head, that he would never see it.

 

 

One year after returning to Bag End, Bilbo woke to the sight of a butterfly. It had landed on the pillow next to him, on the side where he didn’t sleep. Its wings were as blue as the sky on a clear day, with black at the border dotted in white.

“Hello,” Bilbo said, propping himself up on one elbow.

The butterfly did not answer, only showed off the underside of its wing, where large black spots seemed to watch Bilbo like too many eyes. It made him shiver, though the room was hot.

He moved his hand carefully over the pillow, palm up, forefinger extended. He waited there respectfully, and in time the butterfly accepted the offer, tickling the backs of his knuckles as it made itself comfortable.

They remained like this for a moment, until Bilbo, as reflexively as if he were scratching an itch, climbed out from under the quilt and moved away from the bed, carrying his visitor as carefully as he would a too-full cup of tea. It never moved, even as he leaned into the drawer for his ring, even as he passed through the bedroom door, even as he shuffled into the study.

He would ask the children later if they had sent this one, but they would deny it, insisting it must have found its way in on its own. He believed them, though he had no answer for why it took so long for it to find its way out, despite open windows and doors wherever it turned.

Bilbo placed the butterfly at the corner of his writing desk, where it sat watching him as he gathered pen and paper and settled into his chair, still in his night shirt and stifling a yawn. He glanced at the butterfly, and he could have sworn he saw it nod.

Bilbo had a callus on the middle finger of his right hand, which had swollen and shrunk since a childhood spent obsessively learning his letters and writing stories down on every available scrap of paper. He could feel that callus growing again as soon as he gripped the pen to write his first word, in slow, reverent strokes across the top of the page.

_Thorin._

Whether it was a title, or a label, or the first line of a song he had yet to write, Bilbo could not say. The only thing he knew was that he had woken with the name echoing in his head, demanding to get out, and so he had chosen to free it.

He sat back and stared at the word, read it forward and backward, spoke each letter like an incantation in his head. Then he watched with curiosity as the butterfly fluttered to a landing on the still-wet ink, setting down tiny black footprints as it crawled across the blank expanse of the page.

Bilbo took up his pen again.

He locked himself in his study from Tuesday’s sunrise to Thursday’s sunset, and he wrote their story. Not as a linear tale, with chapters and paragraphs and _once upon a times_ , but in flashes and half-formed sentences, sometimes only in single words. He transcribed snippets of conversation, both mundane and momentous; described the sound of his first name finally uttered in a voice he wished so desperately to remember; the feeling of a broad hand brushing his back, and later the pair of them, caged in gold, tugging at the front of his coat; eyes that were familiar and yet not so, flickering on and off like a lantern on a windy night.

His pen raced to catch up with his mind, desperate to make the memories permanent while he was still close enough, before they could slip out of his grasp. He filled pages upon pages, front and back, sometimes circling back to scribble in the margins. Some pages were warped with tears, some marked invisibly with laughter, some both.

When his stomach nagged him, he took whatever he could carry from the pantry and sat snacking on it with his free hand. When his head began to nod, he napped curled into himself on the study carpet, head pillowed on a stack of papers. When his endless pots of tea drove him to the bathroom, he spent the entire visit formulating the next words in his head, repeating them over and over until he could return to the page.

Slow to start and slow to stop.

All the while, the butterfly stayed with him. It rested near his hand, fluttering out of the way when his pen got too close. It perched on Bilbo’s shoulder, camouflaged itself amidst the mess of the bookshelf, followed him into the kitchen for more tea. He gave it honey and fruit and sugar water between pages.

It stayed with him until he felt he had wrung every possible moment from his mind — the good, the bad, and the otherwise, although he knew there would be more. There would always be more. He was leaning back in his chair, sleep pawing at the backs of his eyes, when he noticed the flurry of black and blue wings depart through the cracked-open window.

“I miss you,” Bilbo murmured before he fell asleep, and dreamed of the words he had written.

It was strange, grieving for someone you were only just beginning to know. Bilbo had decades with his parents, knew them down to the sound of their footsteps on the tile. Missing them was missing the past. Missing him was missing the future.

But perhaps, he had thought as he scribbled, if he made the past count, made it weigh heavier in his mind than a future whose inhabitants he couldn’t pick and choose, he could live with it. The future was his own, after all, but the past … that could be theirs. He would feed it and foster it as if it were a living thing, nourishing it not with exaggeration, nor understatement, but with the details he had taken for granted, moments which had sped past him, or which he had kept hidden away in dark corners he dared not enter.

Moving forward by moving backward, as his father might have said.

When Bilbo woke in his study, it was well past midnight, and the room was dark, and cool from the evening air. He stood to close the window and felt his way blindly back to the bedroom without a candle, knowing exactly where to step although he had no memory of learning.

He slept diagonally across the bed that night. The next day, he would return to finish his poem.

_The Road goes ever on and on,_

_Down from the door where it began._

_Now far ahead the Road has gone,_

_And I must follow, if I can,_

_Pursuing it with eager feet,_

_Until it joins some larger way_

_Where many paths and errands meet._

_And whither then? I cannot say._

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been a long time coming. I was inspired by [one of my favorite scenes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW6AkaO-LQM) in the film _Bright Star_ (hence the opening quote and title) and really wanted to see Bag End filled with butterflies. That simple image somehow turned into almost 10k words.
> 
> The poem Bilbo writes is from different versions of "The Road Goes Ever On" which appear in _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_.
> 
> The lesson about the butterfly is [an existing one](http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2007/12/10/the-lesson-of-the-butterfly/), although I'm not entirely sure of the origin. [UPDATE: Thanks so much to Japankasasagi in the comments for letting me know that it comes from [Nikos Kazantzakis' novel _Zorba the Greek_](http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/beyondblue/2007/05/zorba-greek-and-butterflies.html).]
> 
> I listened to a lot of songs to get myself in the mood to write this, but I consider ["Welcome Home" by Radical Face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqi4whXaHx8) to be the unofficial theme song.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. I'd love to know what you think. You can also find me on [Tumblr](http://myrtlebroadbelt.tumblr.com/).


End file.
